LinkedIn is a fantastic, FREE, social media marketing tool for business owners. When you maximise your profile, set up your account correctly, share the right content, use the tools effectively and stick to your engagement strategy, lots of enquiries should be winging their way into your inbox.
To help you massively improve the way you target your connections, boost your performance, find out just how well you are doing, and to save yourself time I have listed below four amazing LinkedIn tips for you to action.
Please note that all of these tools are available on the free version of LinkedIn. As the title of this blog suggests, these are four of the best LinkedIn tools you didn’t know about – if you do know about them already, make sure to make the most of them!
1.LinkedIn For Business: How it works
Before we talk about the uncommonly known LinkedIn tools for business, it helps to know how LinkedIn works and what you can do to increase the number of people you see in your searches. To explain this in a simple way, here’s a basic “how to LinkedIn” diagram.
In this image:
· You are the person in blue.
· The people in red are your 1st connections – you are directly connected to them – either you have accepted their connection request, or they have accepted your request to connect.
· The people in yellow are your 2nd connections – you are not directly connected to them – these are people who are 1st connections to your 1st connections. It’s easier to think of them as ‘friends of a friend’.
· The people in green are your 3rd connections – you are not directly connected to them – these are the people who are 1st connections to your 2nd connections. They’re the ‘friend of a friend of a friend’
It’s like a growing pyramid, it gets bigger when you increase the number of 1st connections you have. If you’re well connected, your 2nd and 3rd connections can run into tens of thousands and more!
If you limit the number of 1st connections, LinkedIn will not show you your 4th connections which ultimately reduces your search ability.
So, my advice to you is to connect with these 2nd and 3rd connections (as long as this is part of your connection strategy) even if you don’t know them to increase your sphere of influence and ultimately increase your search results. You never know, your ideal client could be just one step away!
If you’re not sure how to create a connection strategy, don’t worry, I explain all in my LinkedIn workshops and in my 1-2-1s. I talk about how you can learn more LinkedIn marketing tools at the end of the blog.
2. Get the best results from your searches?
When you are well connected on LinkedIn you can find a lot of prospective clients / connections. But they need to be the right connections for your business objectives. Use this method of searching to gain the best connections! It’s called a Boolean search and it allows you to combine keywords with words such as AND & OR to gain really relevant results.
Go on give it a go and see for yourself … head to the search bar at the top of your screen (obviously you need to be logged into your LinkedIn page to do this).
Type in something like – serviced office space. When I type in these three words, I see that I have found 21k results. The reason why this is so high is because LinkedIn has searched these three words independent of each other as well as together. So, in effect, thousands of these results will be based only on the word ‘office’ which is absolutely no good to me! Who has the time to look through that many profiles?
Now type in these three words again but put speech marks around them like this – “serviced office space”. LinkedIn now knows to only look for these three words in that order. The results I get when using this method is 822 results – that’s a bit better.
But this final step makes all the difference to actually finding the person you want to target. Find out the title of the person you want to connect with, this maybe the decision maker in an organisation. For example, type in “serviced office space” AND “operations manager”. When I do this, I get 77 relevant searches. Jackpot!!
3. Stop your LinkedIn newsfeed filling up with irrelevant content
OK, so now you have increased your number of connections and happy that they are relevant to your objectives – good job! What do you do about the increased volume of content that could potentially hit your newsfeed?
What you should do is assess who you want to hear from and those you don’t. Really think about who will add value, who you want to do business with and who do you want to build a very strong working relationship with. For those who are there just so you can see their network and connections in your searches you can always unfollow them – Don’t worry, this isn’t the same as un-connecting (yes, I know that’s not a word, but somehow disconnect doesn’t seem right either!).
Simply head to a post they have published, click on the three buttons at the top right of their post and click on ‘unfollow’. You can still message them, see their network, see their connections appear in searches and see their profile – you just won’t ever have their posts pop up on your feed.
4. Find out how good you are at LinkedIn
This is one of my all-time favourite LinkedIn hacks, it always gets people excited! In just a few seconds you can find out your LinkedIn rating and see how you compare against others similar to you in your sector.
Here’s how:
- Make sure you are logged into your LinkedIn page
Head to The Social Selling page on LinkedIn.
- Click on “Get Your Score Free”
- You will know that the page has connected with you as your LinkedIn profile picture will show at the top right of the screen.
- You will see how you rank against others, what your current score is, and it will show you the average results for others. From the image below, you can see that my current score is 76, while the average in my industry is 27 and the average from my network is 44.
As you can see from the screen grab you get a score for each component which will tell you which ones you need to improve on. This is so valuable for using when you’re creating or updating your next LinkedIn marketing strategy. If you can’t see from the image, here are the four components it focuses on:
- Establish your professional brand
- Find the right people
- Engage with insights
- Build relationships
Again, if you haven’t put your social media strategy in place, I cover this in my upcoming LinkedIn workshop detailed below.
What’s coming up?
My next LinkedIn workshop starts on Tuesday 26th January and runs for one hour every day for four days over zoom. For only £99 for the four sessions, you will:
- Optimise your profile
- Set up your account properly for maximum visibility
- Be taught how to engage and stay in touch with your customers and potential customers
- Be shown how to grow your professional network
- See how to build relationships
- Learn lots of useful LinkedIn tools for lead generation
- Hear more LinkedIn marketing tips 2021
Want to know more? No problem, take a look at the full agenda on Eventbrite. I really hope you can join us!
Bye for now,
Becs
Becs Bate, Social Media consultant, Social Media Executive
